Cognitive Estrangement
A technique in science fiction that presents an alternative reality plausible enough to take seriously but strange enough to make the reader question assumptions about their own world.
Origin
Coined by Croatian-Canadian scholar Darko Suvin in his 1972 essay "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre" and expanded in his influential 1979 book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Suvin fused Viktor Shklovsky's Russian Formalist concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization) with Bertolt Brecht's theatrical Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect), arguing that science fiction's defining feature is the interaction of estrangement with rational cognition. Leveraged later by sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson to transform familiar, often dystopian, aspects of modern capitalism and climate change into strange, new perspectives that challenge readers to envision alternatives.